Supporting Excellent Reading Instruction
So All Students Can Read

Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter welcome you to the Readsters® website. At Readsters our passion for seeing students of all ages learn to read inspires the support we deliver. Explore our website to see the many ways we might support you.

Watch New Reading Rockets Videos with Linda Farrell

Looking at Reading Interventions:
Linda works individually with six K–3rd grade students on specific reading weaknesses. Coaches, teachers, and college instructors have all found the videos useful for illustrating strong reading intervention practices.

• Reese: Letter names and v/y letter confusion
• Aiko: b/d confusion, keep your eyes on the words
• Autumn: Blending onset-rime
• Calista: Short vowel sounds, phoneme manipulation, sound-by-sound to whole word reading
• Michael: Confusion between cvc and silent e words (e.g., hop/hope)
• Xavier: Reading multi-syllable words and reading text accurately
• More videos supporting excellent reading instruction

Consulting and Professional Development

• Working in schools to model, foster, and guide effective reading instruction for meeting the needs of all students.
• Presenting workshops for reading educators on all aspects of reading, with a special emphasis on beginning and struggling readers.
• Presenting at reading conferences around the nation.
• Providing training and consulting related to Phonics Blitz™, Phonics Boost™, and the Diagnostic Decoding Surveys, products for reading instruction and assessment coauthored by Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter.
• Helping schools develop goals and objectives that support the Common Core Standards and state standards for reading and language arts.
• Consulting with international organizations to create effective early grade reading curriculum in developing countries.

Products

• Developing and offering products that improve reading skills.
• Current products are:
  • • Phonics Plug-In series teaches beginning and struggling readers to decode well.
      • Phonics Plug-In ONE: the first set of lessons in a planned set of six. The lessons teach accurate decoding with beginning phonics in small group instruction to beginning readers and to older struggling readers.
      • Phonics Plug-In TWO: the second set of lessons in a planned set of six. The lessons continue the beginning phonics scope and sequence in small group instruction for beginning readers and to older struggling readers.
    • Downloadable Practice Packets improve reading by fixing:

  1. b-d confusions
  2. other common letter confusions (e.g., g-j, b-p, y-w)
  3. confusing high frequency words (e.g., was-saw,
  where-were, her-here)
  4. confusion reading words with closed syllable (CVC) and silent-e (VCe) vowel spellings (e.g., hop-hop, shin-shine,
  glob-globe)

  • Basic Letter Tile Set: magnetic letter tiles, colored tiles, and dry-erase workspace in a compact, folding, one-piece, lightweight, stackable case.
  • Teaching Vowel Sounds: lesson plans explicitly teach students to hear and label the vowel sounds in spoken words. This ability supports reading and spelling success.
  • Vowel Sound Posters: help students identify and remember the vowel sounds and their labels.

Resources

• Sharing free assessments to diagnose why readers of all ages struggle.
• Providing free resources for teachers to support excellent reading instruction.
• Issuing Readsters Reader, a quarterly newsletter with articles of interest to reading educators.

Sign up to receive Readsters Reader, our e-mail newsletter